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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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I don't think this is true for a number of reasons. Firstly, declines in fertility are somewhat due to endocrine disruptors from microplastic pollution we've caused. That isn't going away for anyone any time soon. Secondly, there seems to be a deeper link between modernity and fertility that most want to admit.

The only evolutionary pressure on humanity at the moment is to have more kids. We evolved our whole endocrine system; merely adapting to the presence of microplastics in the environment is utterly trivial in comparison. Similarly, our sexual instincts evolved; obviously the small tweaks necessary to encourage reproduction in spite of modernity can evolve. And it's not as though those adaptations aren't already latent in the population: there are plenty of high-fertility families. Population will drop until those alleles predominate, of course, but that's just the nature of the evolutionary process. That can (and likely will) cause a lot of short-term pain, but it certainly doesn't represent an extinction risk, and only extinction could prevent the population from eventually rebounding.

Finally, as many on this forum are loathe to admit, we have actually outrun the carrying capacity of this planet. There won't be another fertility explosion in this culture because the planet literally will not support it for much longer.

How can you tell? Exceeding carrying capacity generally manifests as mass death, not reduced fertility. What resource is the planet no longer able to supply?

Not space: there remain enormous tracts of undeveloped land, and far more underdeveloped land; people can live comfortably -- by revealed preference, prefer to live -- in cities with orders of magnitude higher population density than the world as a whole.

Not energy: known uranium reserves alone contain 100X the energy of all the fossil fuels humanity has ever burned, and that's most conservative possible estimate. Extracting uranium from seawater, for example, is another factor of 100X, and D-D fusion would outlast the sun at current consumption rates. And desalination makes water a question of energy. (Sea water actually contains enough dissolved uranium to power its own desalination ten times over.)

Not food: never in history has acquiring food taken a smaller fraction of human labor or a smaller amount of arable land per capita, and we're not particularly optimized for the latter -- substituting grains for meat would boost calories-per-acre by a factor of 10-30. And most 'sustainability' issues (nitrogen fertilizer production, water use) are trivially solved with sufficient energy too, and the rest with hydroponics and recycling.

I can't see any factor that dictates global carrying capacity is 8 billion -- I can hardly see any that suggests it's 80 billion.

You're missing one. Pollution! The most obvious aspect of this is climate change, where we are wrecking the climatic conditions that allow stable agriculture, but there are many other aspects of pollution including microplastics which I mentioned, and heavy metals that will heavily impact our fertility rate.

I don't believe we have unlimited energy resources like you seem to, but this is an argument for another time. In terms of space, we already use the vast majority of arable land on this planet.

Fantastic post! Most of the time, when environmentalists suggest that a resource is "limited", it's because we're already meeting current supply using an ostensibly-limited source, so there's no incentive for companies to develop new tech that's more expensive on the margin. This looks to the outside observer as us "running out". Seawater is a great example: first-world nations absolutely could afford desalination for all our current needs (and Israel already does this, I believe) ... but that'd be silly while we still have fresh water to use.

My slightly tongue-in-cheek answer to what we might run out of is "work". As more nations get rich and privileged, it seems like their citizens start to feel that society owes them a comfortable life while they sit around doing nothing. (Imagine if /r/Antiwork became a popular global movement.) Our civilization is very efficient, but it's possible there's some critical threshold of indolence at which our infrastructure just starts breaking down, and fast. Unlike low fertility, this might be a self-reinforcing collapse that can't be recovered from.

We may be in a race to see if we can replace workers with AI faster than they quit on their own...